Police sitting on cheating case against Hasan Ali

More than two years after the Worli police arrested Pune businessman Hasan Ali Khan for giving false information to obtain a passport, they are yet to file a charge sheet in the case.

The delay, legal experts fear, could help Khan move for quashing of the case at a later stage. The police claimed that they are waiting to obtain some documents that are crucial to prove Khan’s lies.

“We had made applications to the regional passport office but some documents are yet to come,” said additional commissioner of police (central region) Vineet Agarwal. “We will try to expedite the process and take the investigation forward.”

The Worli police arrested Khan on December 15, 2008 for forgery, cheating and procuring fake passports. The case was registered in February that year. Khan was later released on bail. The police had said that Khan had lost his original passport, issued by the regional passport office at Hyderabad in 2006, when he was in England. The Indian High Commission’s office gave him a fresh passport valid for a year.

Khan allegedly travelled to Switzerland and Canada with that passport before finally applying for a new passport at Pune. The police later found that Khan had two other passports, one issued in Mumbai and the other at Patna. Both were allegedly procured by submitting two sets of documents. The law does not allow one person to hold more than one passport. “Our case against him was that of submission of false information for obtaining passports,” said Agarwal.

Sources in the Mumbai regional passport office said that it was unlikely that any document submitted by Khan for getting the passport would be found in the passport office. The few documents that they had, they gave to the police, they said. Khan’s lawyer, IP Bagadia, told HT that the case against his client was weak because the police failed to get his bail cancelled twice. “They have already told the court that his passport was genuine,” Bagadia said.